Saturday, April 05, 2014

One of the
largest diplomatic missions in Taiwan is also one of the least curious about
what’s going on here

Yesterday I
wrote about the intellectual laziness of Western media and academics, and how
this has hampered their ability not only to understand the complex nature of
the Sunflower Movement, but also to see the crisis coming. In today’s
follow-up, I turn my sights on the foreign diplomatic community, which in some
case has been just as complacent.

First, the good
news: It’s not all bad. In the past year or so, senior representatives from a
number of foreign diplomatic missions based here in Taiwan have turned to local
journalists, academics and activists to learn about civic activism. Over lunch
or beer(s), I’ve often had the occasion to engage officials on the subject.
Sometimes they would even invite me to brief high-ranking officials visiting
from the capital. The office that represents my home country here has done this
homework; they have left the comfort of their offices and actually went out
there to talk with actual people. In other words, they are doing the job that
they get paid for. Many other diplomatic missions here have been doing that as
well.

In fact, one day
before the seminal occupation of the Legislative Yuan on March 18, I was telling
a pair of senior officials from the representative office of a certain Western
European country that the biggest story in Taiwan in 2014 would be social (in)stability. Both seemed keenly interested, though this must not have come as a
surprise to them, as the female representative had been following the issue for
a while (I ran into her at the 228 Memorial Day event at Liberty Square a few
weeks earlier).

I’d been doing
my best to alert anyone who asked that social instability and its impact on
cross-strait relations would be the big story for the next couple of years. I knew that because I’d been paying
attention to social activism for the previous 24 months and saw the inexorable
clash coming. Interestingly, this is pretty much what I told a journalist from
the New York Times over coffee in
Taipei soon after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) kicked him out of China
because his publication had actually done its job there and unearthed some
pretty nasty bits about the Chinese government. I told him he was fortunate to
find himself temporarily in Taiwan because things were bound to get
interesting. To the great benefit of Taiwan, Austin Ramzy has since produced a
number of quality pieces for the NYT
about the Sunflower Movement.

Now the bad
news: the rest of them. One country in particular, whose officials tend to
comment most on Taiwan because of the role their country has played in the
Taiwan Strait over the years, has missed the boat entirely. Part of the reason
why their pronouncements on the Sunflower occupation have been so notoriously
one-sided is that their officials’ entire lives tend to gravitate around the
office, the nearby drinking hole, and their home. That particular country,
which never misses a chance to flaunt its indispensability, has a long, sad
tradition of fielding diplomats who couldn’t be any less interested in getting
to know the locals, and whose distrust of journalists puts people like me in almost the same category of mistrust as a Gaza bomb maker. Theirs is a bunker mentality, an unhealthy mix of lack of
curiosity, a sense of superiority, and masters back home who rarely encourage
going beyond the bare minimum (for examples of diplomats getting into trouble for
caring and reporting on local events, I strongly encourage people to read Gary
J. Bass’ The Blood Telegram).

That country’s inability
to see the speeding train of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 coming makes for fascinating
reading, and a lot of material about that incident has since been released, including
helpful case studies by Harvard University (required reading during my graduate
studies on intelligence and political analysis). Back then political officers
would have had to visit the bazaar in person and collect cassette tapes from
the Ayatollah Khomeini; today all they have to do at minimum is to log on to
the Internet and visit the many web pages created by the Sunflower Movement and
its predecessors.

A famous former
ambassador of that country to the U.N. and to South Africa when Apartheid was
still active once bemoaned that very thing: His political officers rarely
left the office and were notoriously uncurious about the country in which they
found themselves. It’s a rampant problem, not just for staff deployed here
in Taiwan.

One dangerous consequence of this is that this important country
often makes decisions that are based on superficial reporting about, and an
even more shallow understanding of, complex developments abroad. That’s why a
few years ago when Wikileaks started releasing diplomatic cables from that
three-lettered office in Taiwan, I’d tell people not to expect much in terms of
secrets and content. As a former government employee myself who consumed reams
of diplomatic cables, I knew above all the soporific properties of that kind of
material.

Dozens of
diplomatic missions operating here in Taiwan have turned to me, and others, for
briefings in the past two years, in large part to discuss social movements. Not
once has the aforementioned mission done so, and as far as I know, it hasn’t
turned to its own citizen experts in-country either. Why would they if they
already know everything?

We shouldn’t be
surprised then if that mission’s official stance on the Sunflower Movement is
so despairingly skewed and sounds like it was drafted by the Ma Ying-jeou
administration itself. They don’t know what the stakes are, because they couldn’t
be bothered to study the root causes of the current crisis. (Photo by the author)

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About Me

Taipei-based Senior Non-Resident Fellow at China Policy Institute @ U Nott, associate researcher at CEFC, ed.-in-chief Thinking Taiwan. M.A. War Studies Royal Military College of Canada, International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance from CIHC, CX-77 (peacekeeping) Lester Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, B.A. English lit. Deputy news editor and a reporter at the Taipei Times 2006-2013. Intelligence officer for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (2003-2005). I have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, SCMP, National Interest, Lowy Interpreter, The Age, Jane’s Defence Weekly, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Jane’s Intelligence Weekly, Jane’s Navy International, Jane’s International Defence Review, the Ottawa Citizen, China Brief, CounterPunch, FrontLine Security, Strategic Vision, Asia Today International, The News Lens and The Diplomat. I was the 2012 recipient of the award for Outstanding Journalism from the Chen Wen-chen Memorial Foundation. I have appeared on BBC, CBC, CNN, VOA, RTI and Al-Jazeera. I use a Nikon D7100 camera. Follow me on Twitter @jmichaelcole1